whatever role Pakistan may have played in the years that followed—that Pakistan deserves at least some of the credit for the outcome in 2011.
According to CIA director Panetta, U.S. authorities gave the Pakistanis no advance notice of the 2011 strike that led to bin Laden’s demise—though the operation involved a highly sensitive incursion, an overflight of Pakistan’s airspace, and action on the ground deep inside Pakistani territory. “It was decided,” Panetta told
Both U.S. and Pakistani officials, however, initially suggested that Pakistan may have been informed—“a few minutes” in advance. Some sources in the Pakistani capital claimed that they had been cooperating with the United States, and had been keeping the building in Abbottabad under surveillance.
There is another wrinkle, one that may eventually illuminate the truth about the attitude of those in authority in Pakistan—whatever knowledge some Pakistani element may have had of bin Laden’s presence in the town. Ten days after the strike against bin Laden, it was reported that a decade ago—after 9/11—President Bush struck a deal with then–Pakistan president Musharraf. Under the deal, should bin Laden be located inside Pakistan’s borders, the U.S. would be permitted unilaterally to conduct a raid.
“There was an agreement,” a former senior U.S. official was quoted as saying, “that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him. The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn’t stop us.” Musharraf has denied that the reported deal was made. A Pakistani official, however, reportedly offered corroboration for the story. “As far as our American friends are concerned,” he said, “they have just implemented the agreement.”
Pakistan did, sure enough, protest the violation of its sovereignty after bin Laden was killed. Should anything similar occur in the future, Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani said sternly, his country would be within its rights “to retaliate with full force.” That, though, according to the U.S. source of the story, was merely the “public face” of the arrangement. Gilani himself had reportedly long since said of similar possible American action: “I don’t care if they do it, so long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.”
A full, authoritative account of the painstaking hunt for the world’s most wanted man, and an accurate telling of the circumstances surrounding his bloody end, lies in the future. Meanwhile, the certainty must be that Osama bin Laden is dead.
His cadaver has not been seen publicly—U.S. officials say it was rapidly disposed of at sea following Muslim funeral rites. As of early June 2011, no photographs had been publicly released—President Obama said displaying “trophies” was not his administration’s way. Some members of the Congress, however, are said to have seen photographs and to accept that the face of the dead man depicted resembles that of bin Laden. DNA analysis has established the identification, according to the administration.
In a statement on the websites on which it habitually posted messages, moreover, al Qaeda acknowledged that bin Laden is dead. His blood, it threatened, will not have been spilled in vain. “We will remain, God willing, a curse chasing the Americans and their agents.… Soon, God willing, their happiness will turn to sadness. Their blood will be mingled with their tears.”
AFTERWORD
IN THE TEN YEARS SINCE THE ATTACKS ON THE UNITED STATES—THE last four and more of them dominated for us by the writing of this book—there have been momentous events that grew out of the catastrophe—and resolution of virtually nothing.
“We are sure of our victory against the Americans and Jews, as promised by the Prophet,” bin Laden had said three years before 9/11. In 2009, in a letter to the military judges at Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said the attack had been “the noblest victory known to history over the forces of oppression and tyranny.”
Victory? Amid all his flowery verbiage, the essential elements of what bin Laden demanded are clear. He called for: the “complete liberation of Palestine”; an end to the American “Crusaders’ occupation of Saudi Arabia”; an end to the U.S. “theft” of Arab oil at “paltry prices”; and the removal of [Arab] governments that “have surrendered to the Jews.”
A decade on, we are witnessing a great upheaval across the Middle East. Two Arab dictatorships have been toppled, six others to one degree or another rocked by rebellion or protest. Oil, which bin Laden had variously said should retail at $144 a barrel and “$100 a barrel at least,” at one point since 2001 peaked at $146. In early spring 2011, it stood at $124.
As for the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, all were gone by fall 2003. Only conditional upon a subsequent pullout, reportedly, had Crown Prince Abdullah permitted the use of Saudi bases for the invasion of Iraq. The Palestine issue, though—a constant in bin Laden’s rhetoric from the start and so far as one can tell the primary motivation for KSM and the principal operatives involved in the 9/11 attacks—festers on.
How much the activity of bin Laden and al Qaeda had to do with what has changed is another matter. Though rumors swirl, there is no good evidence that Islamist extremism is playing an important role in the latest turmoil across the region. The price of oil vacillates not so much according to doctrine as according to the law of supply and demand. On the other hand, the threat of more terrorist attacks—in both America and Saudi Arabia—was surely a factor in the decision to remove the U.S. military from Saudi territory.
The decade has seen some American pressure applied to Israel over its persistent occupation of Palestinian territory and its overall treatment of the Palestinians. It has been ineffectual pressure, though, and the United States’ commitment to Israel seems undiminished. Few people, it seems, are even aware that the Palestine issue was a primary motivation for the perpetrators of 9/11.
The true effect of the 2001 onslaught is less what it achieved than what it triggered. Bin Laden and some of those closest to him had fervently hoped to goad the United States into retaliating. “We wanted the United States to attack,” his military chief Mohammed Atef said after an earlier attack. “… They are going to invade Afghanistan … and then we will start holy war against the Americans, exactly like the Soviets.” The notion was that the United States could be bled into defeat, literally and financially, as the Soviets had been in Afghanistan, and bin Laden shared it.
Then there was Iraq. “I am rejoicing,” he said in 2003, “that America has become embroiled in the quagmires of the Tigris and Euphrates. Bush thought that Iraq and its oil would be easy prey, and now here he is, stuck in dire straits.”
A decade after 9/11, even with bin Laden dead we cannot know the end of the story. The invasion of Afghanistan that some al Qaeda leaders had desired brought disruption and death both to the organization and to the country that hosted it. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, however, the United States and its allies remain bogged down—though not necessarily as fatally as bin Laden hoped. Human casualties aside, however, the dollar cost of the “war on terrorism”—Afghanistan, Iraq, and other post-9/11 operations—was as of last year estimated to have been $1.15 trillion. That, a Congressional Research Service report indicated, made it second only to the cost of World War II, even with adjustments for inflation.
A recent Pew Research survey indicated that support for the cause bin Laden and al Qaeda have espoused had faded in the Muslim countries studied. “Brand bin Laden,” a U.S. business journal reported of a previous poll, is “dying fast.” Those fighting terrorism are not banking on it.
National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter believed even before the strike on bin Laden that the greatest terrorist threat to the United States was posed by Anwar Aulaqi—the “spiritual adviser” to two key 9/11 terrorists who professed innocence and ignorance after the attacks, then made a getaway at his leisure.
Aulaqi eventually took refuge in Yemen, where he was still believed to be active as of spring 2011. Days after bin Laden was killed, Aulaqi was targeted by a U.S. drone. He reportedly got away.
AT HOME in recent times, there has been crass posturing and prolonged squabbling, with predictably tragic results.
In Florida, after months of threatening to do so—and after many appeals that he desist, including one by President Obama—the pastor of a fringe church he calls the Dove World Outreach Center burned a copy of the Qur’an. He had earlier held a mockery of a “trial” at which the Muslims’ holy book was found guilty of “crimes against humanity.” A “jury” convened by the pastor, Terry Jones, had chosen burning over three other ways of
